Carl June, via Getty

Carl June on CRISPR, CAR–T and how the Viet­nam War dropped him in­to med­i­cine

In Au­gust of 2011, Carl June and his team pub­lished a land­mark pa­per show­ing their CAR–T treat­ment had cleared a pa­tient of can­cer. A year-to-the-month lat­er, Jen­nifer Doud­na made an even big­ger splash when she pub­lished the first ma­jor CRISPR pa­per, set­ting off a decade of in­tense re­search and some­times even more in­tense pub­lic de­bate over the ethics of what the gene-edit­ing tool could do.

Last week, June, whose CAR–T work was even­tu­al­ly de­vel­oped by No­var­tis in­to Kym­ri­ah, pub­lished in Sci­ence the first US pa­per show­ing how the two could be brought to­geth­er. It was not on­ly one of the first time sci­en­tists have com­bined the ground­break­ing tools, but the first peer-re­viewed Amer­i­can pa­per show­ing how CRISPR could be used in pa­tients.

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